The Internet has become an important communication tool. The widespread use of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) increasingly bars visually impaired people from accessing digital information. To facilitate visually impaired person's access to digital data that is offered over internet the development of electronic aids has been ongoing for several decades. Blind and visually impaired computer users currently benefit from many forms of adaptive technology, including speech synthesis, large-print processing, braille desktop publishing, and voice recognition. However, presently a very few of the foregoing tools have been adopted for auditory browsing.
There are multiple screen reading tools, including software programs, available to blind and visually impaired persons enabling them to operate computers and/or mobile devices and to browse the internet in an auditory manner. However, auditory browsing of an information space typically proceeds in serial fashion. As the users move their focus from one webpage element to another, the software tool typically presents auditorially to the users the one or more elements that have focus. Those elements are typically presented in sequence. Text information is typically rendered as synthesized speech. Consequently, this approach is time consuming and provides no awareness of other webpage elements spatially located near the focused-on webpage elements.